Week 46

• Life
  • ❌ Be in bed by 12am at least 3 times
  • ✅ No device usage in bed at all
    • Very happy with this change. Using your phone/tablet in bed has got to be one of the easiest ways to destroy your well-being due to worse sleep and the ease of consuming garbage content.
  • ✅ Work out at least 2 times
  • ❌ Meditate for 20+ minutes at least 3 times
• Taiwan
  • ❌ Book accommodations for at least two weeks following quarantine
    • Oops, totally forgot about this one.
• Browserflow
  • ✅ Add descriptions for each of the commands
  • ❌ Reach out to at least 3 people from the waitlist and offer to onboard them if they're willing to pay $50 for the beta

Reflecting on this list, it's clear that I'm not doing all that much in terms of work. This past week can be excused because I was prepping for my move to Taiwan, but this has been the case over the past several weeks (and months) — I'm moving super slowly. Small, incremental progress is better than no progress so I'm glad that at least that's happening (vs. spending all my time playing Starcraft or something), but it feels a bit off to not have significant milestones in quite a while.

One of the things that I did accomplish this week without really intending to was finishing an Intention feature that I started all the way back in April/May: Focus Mode!

I know I said that I'm going to focus on Browserflow instead of Intention, but this feature was already nearly complete so I wrapped it up during the flight from LA to Taipei. I built this feature because I noticed that I would sometimes try to work on something, find it challenging to focus, and then open up some distracting site. Focus Mode creates an additional barrier to randomly visiting distracting sites when I want to be working, and so far my unwillingness to cancel something in progress been an effective deterrent. We'll see if it's just the novelty effect, but this feels pretty promising.

Week 47

Now I'm in Taiwan and in quarantine for two weeks. I'm in a small hotel room with no windows, which means that unless I look at a clock, I have no sense of what time it is. At first, the complete isolation seemed like a huge bummer, but now it feels like an interesting experiment. Instead of thinking about what I can't do in this situation, I can identify the unique opportunities that this provides. How often do you get to completely design your own schedule and routine without any external factors — not even the time of day? (The only required interaction with the outside world is answering my phone in the afternoon every day because the police station calls to check up on the health status of everyone in quarantine. Taiwan really has it together.)

Some ideas I've been toying with for this environment:

• Letting go of time entirely. What if I hid my watch and other indicators of time? I'm really curious what kind of schedule I'd naturally adopt if I slept whenever I felt tired and did whatever I wanted during the day. If I made a way to mark the time without seeing it, it'd be a great way to determine my circadian rhythm. Although doing this would mean pausing Road to Ramen since I'll have no idea what day it is (or maybe I can write whenever I think a day has passed?). (I caught with an ex yesterday and when I told her about this idea, she paused for a bit and said, "I really dodged a bullet, didn't I?" Yes. Yes, she did.)
• Leaning into the isolation. I think the impulse for many people when being secluded would be to communicate more with their friends and deliberately schedule more social activities. What if I did the opposite? Thanks to having done months of meditation retreats, the idea of not communicating with anyone for a few weeks feels neither foreign nor unpleasant. This could be a great opportunity for a personal retreat of sorts where I slow down and just enjoy my own company.
• Maximizing deep work. I had previously planned to reach out to people and schedule more onboarding sessions, but now I'm considering waiting until I'm out to do that. This feels like the perfect environment to pursue deep work and tackle problems that'd benefit from a high level of sustained focus. What if I spent a week designing the revamped method for recording flows that I've been thinking about for weeks? Or trying to see how far I can get with running Browserflow in the cloud? This goes against my realization that I need to spend more time marketing + selling and less time building product, but hey, this is a special circumstance. I can think of these two weeks as a vacation of sorts, except that the vacation is... getting to write code. Okay, yeah, I may have a problem. Once I re-enter society, then I can focus on shallower work like scheduling chats and marketing. If I can get some basic flows running in the cloud by the end of quarantine, that'd be HUGE.

Decisions:

• For now, I'm going to leave my clocks on, but I'm going to continue tinkering with that idea
• I don't think I'll go off-grid completely, but I'll probably just check my messages once a day.
• I'm going to try to get Browserflow working in the cloud.

I can already tell that routine is going to be the cornerstone of thriving instead of merely surviving in this setting, so I'm going to kick those goals up a notch.